Archive | July, 2013

The Dancing Plague (or Dance Epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days without rest, and, over the period of about one month, some of those affected died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

The outbreak began when a woman, Frau Troffea, began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. This lasted somewhere between four to six days. Within a week, 34 others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers. Some of these people eventually died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion. Historical documents, including “physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council” are clear that the victims danced.

If you follow my posts and podcasts here at Disinformation and elsewhere, you probably know that I’m also a musician in Nashville, TN. Here is the new video for my song “Paradise.” The song and the video both point back to the kind of counter-cultural posts you’re familiar with.

Conceived, directed and edited from public domain footage found at Archive.org, “Paradise” combines images of San Francisco in 1941 with shots from the city captured in 1968 during that era’s counter-cultural revolution. The video takes the song’s declarative chorus as a jumping-off point to celebrate the Utopian impulse that has defined that city.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the 95 year-old man grew combative and refused court-mandated treatment. He was wielding a knife and a cane when officers arrived to assist.He died hours after being tased and then shot with a bean bag round.

Abby Martin goes over the effect of prolonged US military presence in bases all over the world, highlighting the case of Okinawa, Japan, which has hosted over 60 years of US occupation and thousands of young troops who are almost immune from prosecution against crimes committed on the island.

Since the Supreme Court’s striking down of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act in June, lawmakers in conservative Southern states have leapt into action passing legislation to restrict the ability of minorities, the young, the poor, and college students to vote. Via Buzzfeed, some of the most extreme changes are coming in North Carolina:

On Thursday, North Carolina legislators passed a revised voter ID bill, supported by Republicans who control the state Legislature, that would will place sweeping new restrictions on when, where, and how citizens can vote.

The early voting period will be shortened by a week, from 17 days to 10. Same-day registration during the early voting period will be eliminated.

Straight-party ticket voting will be eliminated.

Political party chairpersons will be allowed to designate up to 12 poll “observers” to monitor polling locations in order to ferret out voter fraud. Democracy North Carolina refers to these observers as “vigilantes.”

Sixteen- and 17-year-olds will no longer be allowed to pre-register to vote.

This week: Gremlins cause havoc with our computers, but Kim saves the day, art is vandalised, art is vandalised by it's artists, a film that will melt your head with mushrooms and magick, YouTube the censor, American fast-food chains cheat their employees, Mos Def is a cool guy, football goes batshit, Germans get harassed by advertising in their skulls, and isn't it about time we got a theme tune for sinkholes?
Personnel – Joe Nolan, Kim Monaghan, and Ken Eakins

Apparently determined to ruin the late night fun of stoned teenagers everywhere, BBC Future says ouija boards have nothing to do with departed souls:

The mystery isn’t a connection to the spirit world, but why we can make movements and yet not realise that we’re making them.

Ouija board cups and dowsing wands – just two examples of mystical items that seem to move of their own accord, when they are really being moved by the people holding them. The only mystery is not one of a connection to the spirit world, but of why we can make movements and yet not realise that we’re making them.

The phenomenon is called the ideomotor effect and you can witness it yourself if you hang a small weight like a button or a ring from a string (ideally more than a foot long). Hold the end of the string with your arm out in front of you, so the weight hangs down freely.

Bradley Manning's conviction at his long running trial is breaking news everywhere, this version from CNN:

A military judge has found Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history, not guilty of aiding the enemy -- a charge that would have carried a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Manning was also found not guilty of unauthorized possession of information relating to national defense.
He was found guilty of most of the remaining charges against him, with the judge accepting some of the guilty pleas he made previously to lesser charges...